17 April 2015 (15:23 UTC-07 Tango 01)/27 Farvardin 1394/28 Jumada t-Tania 1436/29 Geng Chen 4713

“I regret that today our company is not performing to the expectations of our customers, our stakeholders or our employees. Our number one priority is to do everything we can to continue to enhance our food safety and quality systems and rebuild the trust of our customers.”-Sarah Casanova

Is U.S. based McDonald’s crashing and burning in Japan?

Once considered an iconic symbol of U.S. capitalism, McDonald’s administrators say the economy is so bad in the east Asian country that they expect to lose between $210-million to $318-million USD by the end of the year (at least triple their losses last year).

Specifically, Mickey D’s administrators say the availability of quality food is becoming hard to get, at a cheap price, in Japan.   Examples are problems with China based chicken meat suppliers, caught on video processing contaminated meat for McNuggets, and problems getting food supplies (like potatoes) from the United States due to Pacific Coast dock worker strikes.

So, they will shutdown 131 Japanese stores, more than 1-thousand jobs affected.  Administrators also revealed they will layoff about 1-hundred jobs at their Tokyo HQ.

Even after the 131 restaurants shutdown McDonald’s will still have 2-thousand stores in Japan, and they plan to spend big money remodeling all of them.